War stories

By Carne Ross

Financial Times

Published: January 29 2005

Nearly two
years after the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, the world
remains polarised over the war. Supporters thought the war
necessary, while many opponents believe a false case was
deliberately manufactured for it.

This allegation has been reinforced by the discovery of a
putative intellectual justification for such deceit, the idea of the
“noble lie” propagated by the late University of Chicago philosopher
Leo Strauss, one of the strongest intellectual influences on the
neo-conservatives. According to Strauss, elites in liberal societies
must sometimes create “myths” to hold those societies together, for
fear that they would otherwise collapse through selfishness and
individualism.

One such myth is the enemy, the threat, the identification and
combating of which forces the society to cohere and unite. Once that
enemy was the Soviet Union and communism; today it is al-Qaeda and
Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

This is a big allegation and it is a toxic dispute, poisonous to
both domestic and international reputations, cause of both angry
accusation and equally bitter rebuttal. But perhaps another part of
the Iraq story - that of sanctions - can help throw light on the
argument.

It was a story in which I was intimately involved: I was, from
1998 to 2002, the British “expert” on Iraq for the UK delegation to
the UN Security Council, responsible for policy on both weapons
inspections and sanctions against Iraq. My experience in those years
and what happened subsequently is in part why I recently resigned
from the Foreign Office.

Opponents of sanctions argued that they were unjustified and
caused immense human suffering in Iraq. Iraq had demonstrably
disarmed; the weapons inspectors’ endless probings and questions
were nugatory. The counter-arguments were plausible: Iraq had failed
on many occasions to co-operate fully with the weapons inspectors,
leaving important questions unanswered; Hussein obstructed the
operation of the UN’s oil-for-food programme, which was designed to
lessen the humanitarian suffering. In northern Iraq, where the UN,
and not Hussein, fully controlled the programme, all indicators
showed the positive benefits of the programme in health, sanitation,
education and the like.

It was my job to cull and collate the innumerable statistics,
reports and testimonies in support of this latter version of the
story and to deploy them in speeches and debates in the Security
Council. On the other side of the table, the diplomats opposing
sanctions - led by Russia and France - could cite myriad reports
detailing the suffering under the sanctions regime and the
inequities of the oil-for-food programme. They could provide
convincing arguments that the north received an unfair share of
oil-for-food funds. Like me, they could deploy an arsenal of facts
and details to validate their version of “the truth”. But, oddly,
they often cited the very same reports that I did, for the UN
reports provided ammunition for both sets of arguments.

It was, of course, a complex story that we managed to divide into
two distinct and opposing narratives. The atmosphere between the
delegations on the Security Council was aggressive and adversarial,
as it remained until - and after - the invasion. Political divisions
were allowed to degenerate into personal animosities. The Council,
its chambers and corridors became a diplomatic battlezone where the
more we fought, the more we entrenched our positions into competing
blacks and whites. Thus were we able to obscure the more complex,
deeper and more important truth, perhaps even the truth.

This was only slowly revealed to me by the many humanitarian
workers, UN officials and ordinary Iraqis, including opposition
members, who actually lived and worked in Iraq rather than those who
wrote or read reports about it. Their human testimony was in the end
infinitely more eloquent and convincing, in the main because all of
them, without exception, said the same thing. And this was that
there was undoubted human suffering in Iraq, of a quite appalling
scale, and that not enough was being done - by anyone - to address
it. Put this question to a British minister today and he or she will
tell you that we tried to ease the impact of sanctions, but it is
clear now, and frankly it was clear then, that it was much, much too
little, too late. We - the US and UK - could have done a great deal
more. Meanwhile, the Russians, French and others in the Security
Council could have done a lot more to help control illegal smuggling
by Iraq (the main sustenance of the Hussein regime and itself
something that reduced the funds for humanitarian supplies) and to
support the weapons inspectors.

This example illustrates how governments and their officials can
compose convincing versions of the truth, filled with more or less
verifiable facts, and yet be entirely wrong. I did not make up lies
about Hussein’s smuggling or obstruction of the UN’s humanitarian
programme. The speeches I drafted for the Security Council and my
telegrams back to London were composed of facts filtered from the
stacks of reports and intelligence that daily hit my desk. As I read
these reports, facts and judgments that contradicted “our” version
of events would almost literally fade into nothingness. Facts that
reinforced our narrative would stand out to me almost as if
highlighted, to be later deployed by me, my ambassador and my
ministers like hand grenades in the diplomatic trench warfare.
Details in otherwise complex reports would be extracted to be
telegraphed back to London, where they would be inserted into
ministerial briefings or press articles. A complicated picture was
reduced to a selection of facts that became factoids, such as the
suggestion that Hussein imported huge quantities of whisky or built
a dozen palaces, validated by constant repetition: true, but not the
whole truth.

It is clear from the evidence available that something similar
went on with the question of Iraq’s weapons. This neither confirms
nor fully refutes the “noble lie” thesis of deliberate deceit. But,
rather, it suggests a more complex and subtle, and if anything more
disturbing, story.

Here the basis of evidence was not UN, NGO or other reports on
sanctions or sanctions-busting, many of which suffered their own
peculiar biases and flaws, but a resource that is unavoidably
unreliable, namely secret intelligence. Particularly after
inspectors were withdrawn in late 1998, the available intelligence
on Iraq was severely limited. Whatever Hussein had or did, he
concealed under roofs or underground, and there is no aircraft or
satellite camera yet invented that can penetrate there.

Both the US and UK were thus forced in large part to rely on that
most unreliable reporter of facts - human beings (or “humint” as it
is known). In addition, there was the expert knowledge of the many
inspectors who had visited Iraq’s WMD sites and had spoken with
Iraqi officials and scientists. Despite these difficulties, the
picture that emerged in the late 1990s and into 2002 was reasonably
consistent.

This was that Iraq was not rearming to any great extent, that
there were still questions about its disposal of past stocks of
weapons but, in summary, that the policy of containment was working.
Inevitably, there were unanswered questions - unconfirmed reports of
attempted imports of dual-use materials that might be used to
produce WMD and possibilities that the unaccounted-for dozen or so
Scud missiles might still exist and be reassembled (not one has been
found postwar). But there was nothing that would suggest significant
rearmament or intent to attack Iraq’s neighbours, let alone the UK.
The Butler report gives a similar account.

Yet, by September 2002, both the US and UK governments were
claiming that Iraq was a significant threat, citing clear and
authoritative intelligence evidence of rearmament and attempts to
acquire nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. The US government
went further, suggesting that Hussein, al-Qaeda and 9/11 were
somehow connected. Bush began to juxtapose al-Qaeda and Hussein in
adjacent sentences, never quite claiming a proven connection, but
deliberately implying some kind of link. The implication, still
repeated to this day by members of the Bush administration, was
refuted by the 9/11 Commission. Even at the time of the war,
Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) let it be known publicly
that there was no foundation to this suggestion.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn cites a
number of studies where scientists with different paradigmatic views
observe different patterns in the same data - what he calls a switch
in the visual gestalt. For example, looking at a contour map, a
student sees lines on a paper, a cartographer a picture of terrain.
Only once trained will the student see the same as the cartographer,
even though the data he is observing have not changed.

Both the British Prime Minister, to the Butler review, and
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have admitted publicly (long after
the war) that what changed before the war was not the evidence of
Iraqi weapons but, in the new post-9/11 light, the appraisal of that
evidence. The Prime Minister told the Butler review: “after
September 11th it took on a completely different aspect... what
changed for me with September 11th was that I thought then you have
to change your mindset... you have to go out and get after the
different aspects of this threat... you have to deal with this
because otherwise the threat will grow... “

This rings true and is understandable. An event of the horror and
magnitude of 9/11 should have changed our appreciation of the
dangers of WMD and non-compliance with international law. It
represented, for good or ill, a paradigm shift in the way our
leaders saw the world. But it appears that not only did the
appraisal change but, crucially, so did the presentation of that
appraisal, and the evidence justifying it, to the public.

There were no doubt other factors at play. There is a tendency in
government to see intelligence material as being at the pinnacle of
the hierarchy of information. Awash with information, government
reifies the skill of abstracting the core from the mass (indeed it
is a skill tested in the entrance exams when you join, for instance,
the Foreign Office). Unlike the voluminous flow of diplomatic
telegrams, memos and open-source information that hits computers on
desks across government every day, intelligence arrives in slim
folders, adorned with colourful stickers announcing not only the
secrecy of the information therein but the restricted circulation it
enjoys. The impression thus given, a product of these aesthetics, is
of access to the real thing, the secret core denied to all but the
elite few.

History gives an interesting example of this phenomenon, namely
the case of the Zinoviev letter. In 1924, Britain’s Foreign Office
was sent a copy of a letter, purporting to come from Grigori
Zinoviev, the president of the Soviet Comintern, addressed to the
central committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The
letter urged the party to stir up the British proletariat in
preparation for class war. The letter then appeared in the press,
causing immense political and diplomatic repercussions. It was a
major embarrassment for the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, and
the governing Labour Party. The opposition Conservatives won the
general election four days later. Relations between Britain and the
Soviet Union soured, and Anglo-Soviet treaties were abandoned.

Only in 1999, when the then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook ordered
an investigation of Britain’s official archives, was it confirmed
that the Zinoviev letter was a fake. The fake was believed as
genuine by the Foreign Office, the archives revealed, because it
came from the Secret Intelligence Service (this an observation from
the Foreign Office’s own archival investigation).

An additional factor in Iraq was also that many of the human
sources of intelligence had an understandable interest in
exaggerating what they were reporting, not least because they wanted
to encourage the overthrow of a regime they hated. The role of the
Iraqi National Congress, the key Iraqi opposition group before the
war, in providing “humint” is now well-known. But, interestingly,
the Butler inquiry discounts this factor, instead pointing to the
SIS’s failure to properly validate its sources, the long reporting
chains and the sources’ lack of expertise on what they were
reporting.

Back in the capitals, there is meanwhile an invisible undertow at
work on the civil servants who collate and analyse this information.
If ministers want a particular story to emerge, it has a way of
emerging: the facts are made to fit the policy. It takes a brave if
not foolhardy civil servant to resist this tide. This is not to
claim that there was some secret cubicle in Whitehall (or
Washington) where evidence of Iraq’s weapons was deliberately
fabricated, but something more subtle. Evidence is selected from the
available mass, contradictions are excised, and the selected data
are repeated, rephrased, polished (spun, if you prefer), until it
seems neat, coherent and convincing, to the extent that those
presenting it may believe it fully themselves.

All of these reasons will have contributed to a considerable bias
in the information that the government received and the analyses
then produced on Iraq’s WMD. All of these reasons should have
inspired caution; any assessment based on such information should
have been heavily caveated. But, as the Butler report relates,
instead of transmitting these caveats in its public presentations,
such as the infamous Number 10 dossier, the government left them
out. What was broadcast to the public was in effect not the summit
of a hierarchy of information but a selection from a spectrum of
information, a spectrum that ranged from the well-established to the
highly speculative, and the selection came from the wrong end. Just
as I once produced one-sided arguments to justify sanctions by
ignoring all contrary evidence, the government produced a highly
one-sided account of inherently unreliable information.

Of course governments in all democracies present one-sided
accounts of policy. Economic statistics are always presented with
the positive numbers in the forefront, the negative sidelined to
footnotes or ignored. Civil servants are highly skilled in slanting
information in this way. But there should be limits. When seeking to
justify military action, the government has a duty to tell the whole
truth, not just a partial account of it.

Something else was going on too. As the drums of war beat louder
in Washington, both the US and UK governments became more strident
in dismissing containment or other alternatives to all-out invasion.
Bush declared sanctions as full of holes as Swiss cheese; the Prime
Minister even once, bizarrely, argued that military action was
preferable to the distress caused by sanctions. Sanctions were
crumbling, the public was told (and still is today). These
governments gave the impression that all alternatives had been
exhausted; war was the only option.

This was not in fact the case. There was a viable alternative.
Effective action to seize Hussein’s illegal financial assets and
block oil smuggling would have denied him the resources which
sustained his power. Sanctions on the regime, and not its
long-suffering people. This alternative was, unfortunately, for many
years before the war never pursued with the necessary energy or
commitment. The reasons for this are not immediately obvious.

Such a policy would have required consistent pressure across the
region, applied to all of Iraq’s neighbours. And, for different
reasons in each case, it wasn’t pursued with sufficient vigour.
Senior envoys and ministers only rarely or half-heartedly mentioned
smuggling in bilateral contacts, thereby implying toleration.
Gradually it came to be understood that certain of Iraq’s neighbours
were “allowed” to import illegal oil, undermining attempts to deal
with even the most egregious sanctions-busters.

Meanwhile, back in the Security Council, any attempt we made to
propose collective action against smuggling was invariably blocked
by France or Russia, on the alleged grounds that there was
insufficient proof of the smuggling, or that such action might
further harm Iraq’s people. I lost count of the number of times we
inserted provisions for sanctions-monitoring units, or other
exhortations for action, into draft Council resolutions, only to
have diplomats from these countries strike them out in negotiation
(as veto-wielding permanent members, their acquiescence was
essential to every dot and comma). The US and UK governments now
like to claim that this was the reason sanctions failed (when in
doubt, blame the French); some even claim that the UN itself
connived at corruption to benefit Hussein (an allegation for which
so far there is scant evidence). But, in truth, we too exerted
precious little energy to enforce controls. While in New York we
argued ourselves hoarse in negotiation, Washington and London rarely
lifted the diplomatic equivalent of a finger to pressure Iraq’s
neighbours to stem the illegal flows.

An effective anti-smuggling policy would have required an
over-arching and long-term strategy, addressing problems - ranging
from illegal bank accounts to cross-border oil smuggling - in a
variety of different areas. Such a strategy was never implemented.
Instead there were piecemeal and ineffective efforts.

I suspect that the reason for this perhaps lies in the universal
human truth that what can be left until later usually is, until it
is too late. The policy was difficult, complex and unfashionable,
demanding extensive study to master and discuss, a luxury busy
ministers and senior officials do not enjoy. It was never the first
or most glamorous priority, so it was allowed to slide.

In the end, when contrasted with the complexity and uncertainty
of the alternatives, war may have seemed simpler. In the strange way
that governments are swept along by events without properly stopping
to think, war came to be seen as the only viable course, a current
strengthened in Britain no doubt by the clear determination in
Washington, now amply chronicled in Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack,
to pursue conflict.

It would undoubtedly have taken considerable political and
diplomatic effort to corral Iraq’s neighbours and other states into
this alternate course. It would not have had the binary clarity of
winning or losing a war (though this war seems neither won yet, nor
lost). But this effort would have certainly been less than that of
going to war, and it had the real potential to remove the regime by
cutting away the funds that sustained it. Above all, this approach
would not have incurred the sacrifice of Iraqi and British and
American, and other, lives.

If Iraq was not a threat and not collaborating with terrorists,
why did the Bush and Blair governments go to war? Several plausible
explanations have been offered by others: the US administration’s
need, after 9/11, to demonstrate its power - anywhere, anyhow; a
“mission civilatrice” to democratise the world by force, an impulse
given strength by the vigorous and forceful lobby of the Iraqi
opposition. But less credible, given the record on sanctions, is the
claim that the welfare of the Iraqi people was the primary
concern.

Another possible explanation lies in the more sinister motives of
oil and its control. The prospect of Iraq’s huge reserves (the
second largest in the world) hung in the air throughout policy
deliberations in the years before the war. It was well-known that
Hussein had allocated all the massively lucrative post-sanctions
exploration contracts to French, Chinese, Russian and other non-US
and non-British companies (and it bothered the companies a lot, as
they would tell us). It is hard to believe that the immense
potential for money-making and energy security did not exert some
pull in the decision to invade, but the evidence for a Chomskyan
sort of conspiracy led by Big Oil is hard to come by. But again, we
do not know, because we have not been told. Instead we were given
not the “noble lie”, but the somewhat less-than-noble half-truth.
The full answer will perhaps be revealed by the chief protagonists
in years to come. For now, all we can know for sure is that the
empirical reasons these governments have given so far simply do not
add up.

Perhaps, therefore, a non-empirical reason is at the heart of
this. They did it because they thought it was right. Hussein was a
bad man, a potential danger in the future (if not today). And this,
if true, is a legitimate reason, or at least arguable.
Unfortunately, it is neither the primary reason both governments
gave the UN or their peoples for going to war (though Bush alludes
to it with ever greater frequency, and Tony Blair has begun to do
the same), nor is it justifiable in any canon of international law
(although perhaps it should be).

And here we return to Leo Strauss: not to the “noble lie”, but to
his belief in “natural law”, a fundamental, sometimes religious
(though Strauss, I read, was an atheist) sense of right and wrong, a
right and wrong superior to all other laws- including, it seems in
this case, international law. Both leaders have said in the past
that they believe in such rules, as I suspect do most of us in some
way. And it is perhaps the readiness of electors, especially in the
US, to accept this reasoning that lies behind the curious phenomenon
that, although the evidence that these governments misled their
populaces is now clear, neither Bush nor Blair appears likely to pay
any long-term political price for it.

In the recent presidential elections the allegation of lying,
noble or otherwise, and the decidedly ambiguous course of the
resulting war, did not turn the people against their chosen
president. His “natural law” argument - that it was right to remove
Hussein - sufficed, even when the empirical evidence didn’t. Tony
Blair is no doubt hoping the same will be true when Britain goes to
the polls.

Political theorists of the 21st century have much to feed on in
this analysis: it is a story rich in paradox and contradiction, from
which it is hard to divine rational inferences or laws. The
governments did not manufacture lies, but neither did they tell the
truth, even when they thought they did. These half-truths, moreover,
bore no relation whatsoever to the real truth of what was actually
going on in Iraq (no terrorists, no WMD). And in the end, the
electors, in the name of whose security and safety the whole
exercise was undertaken, do not seem to care much either way. In
this picture, it seems that neither Strauss nor Plato (who in fact
originated the “noble lie”) nor anyone else is much guide. Things
seem altogether less ordered and coherent than any logical analysis
would have it. The key actors claim to have agency, to make rational
decisions, but in fact are swept along by forces they cannot grasp.
Laws of democracy and morality give way: the law of chaos instead
must hold sway.

Here may be the biggest misperception of all, though not a lie,
since it is hardly conscious. This is a misperception - a fiction,
if you like - in which governments and governed collaborate alike,
for to believe otherwise is too uncomfortable. And this is that
governments, politicians and civil servants are able to observe the
world without bias and disinterestedly interpret its myriad signs
into facts and judgments (indeed, in the Foreign Office, telegrams
are divided into these two very categories: “Detail” and “Comment”)
with an objective, almost scientific rigour. The story of what these
two governments observed, believed and then told their populations
about Iraq suggests an altogether more imperfect reality.

Carne Ross recently resigned from the senior management structure
of the British Diplomatic Service. He is now director of a new
diplomatic consultancy, Independent Diplomat.